C-ROADS is decision-maker-oriented simulation that helps users understand the long term climate impacts of various futures for fossil fuel emissions, other emissions, sequestration, and various uncertainties.

Our team from Sustainability Institute, Ventana Systems, and MIT in the U.S. has developed “C-ROADS” (formerly called “Pangaea”), a decision-maker-oriented international climate simulator.
C-ROADS stands for “Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator.”

As opposed to most climate models, which take significant time to run and are designed for scientists, this simulator will be posted in its 3-region form as freeware on the internet, can be used by non-modelers, and runs in less than .1 second on a laptop.

C-ROADS has undergone a scientific review from an independent team of respected climate scientists, climate modelers, and system dynamicists. The review committee was chaired by Dr. Robert Watson, former Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Click here for the summary statement.

The policy-design-oriented version of C-ROADS is being used at top government corporate, and NGO levels  via the Climate Action Initiative, a partnership of The Heinz Center, Sustainability Institute, The Forum for Active Philanthropy, and Executive Learning Partnerships.

The simulator operates at three levels of regional disaggregation — 3, 7, or 14 global negotiating blocs. This allows users to ask questions such as “what if all countries follow their current commitments?” What if the EU really reduces emissions 80% below 1990 by 2050, the US follows something like the Markey-Waxman legislation, Mexico drops 50% below 2002 by 2050,  China continues decreasing its emissions intensity and so on?

In practice negotiations and in strategy conversations, we’ve seen the simulator help both technical and non-technical people quickly understand the long term implications (CO2 concentration, temperature, sea level rise) of climate agreements while considering per capita, cumulative, future, and current emissions as well as GDP, populations, and emissions intensity. Potential uses range from private strategic planning sessions to “mock-U.N.” negotiations (at MIT, for European business leaders in Greenland, and for national security strategists in Washington DC with the Center for a New American Security) to posting the simulator globally in multiple languages to help global citizens understand and influence mitigation approaches.

C-LEARN, a learning-oriented, simpler version of this simulator is be available online for the world to use, adapt, extend, and translate into new languages in partnership with Forio.

The origins of C-ROADS is the 1997 PHD dissertation of Dr. Thomas Fiddaman, “Feedback Complexity in Integrated Climate-Economy Models,” MIT Sloan School of Management. Dr. Fiddaman now works with Ventana Systems, one of the creators of the current version of C-ROADS as well as other economy-energy-environment simulations.

C-ROADS is copyright 2009, Sustainability Institute and Ventana Systems.

Resources:

• a five page overview of the simulator
• the one-page summary from the Scientific Review
• our 77 page technical reference guide on the simulator, including simulation purpose, structure, parameters, test results, and bibliography
• our white paper on one key finding from C-ROADS, presented by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin at a March 2009 scientific conference in Copenhagen, Denmark — an analysis of emissions reduction proposals for COP-15
• a pdf of the slides Dr. Elizabeth Sawin used at the March 09 scientific conference in Copenhagen, Denmark
• more information on how it has been adapted and used
• a pdf of the slide deck presented by Dr. John Sterman and Dr. Bob Corell on 18 March 2009 at an event of the AMS on Capitol Hill